The Clinton Foundation is back, and it’s headed to Ukraine.
Founded by former President Bill Clinton and his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the foundation put its annual “Clinton Global Initiative” on a hiatus for a few years when their relevance ebbed and fundraising dried up, but their scandal-plagued charity has returned with a plan to provide humanitarian relief to warn-torn Ukraine, complete with a benediction from Pope Francis.
The Clinton Foundation’s shady dealings were exposed in 2015 by Peter Schweizer in the bestselling book Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich. On the most recent podcast of The Drill Down, Schweizer commented on the return of the Clintons and their historical gift for grift.
“The problem is that the Clintons have turned [disaster relief] into disaster capitalism,” Schweizer said. “What we found is that the Clintons were doing a lot of relief work and then working with major corporations that wanted deals in countries that were having a war.”
Clinton Cash documented examples of this in countries around the world, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Colombia, and Haiti, where the Clinton Foundation operated various disaster relief and reconstruction activities. Very often, the companies receiving the government contracts to perform those activities were major donors to the Clinton Foundation, not to mention relatives of the Clintons themselves.
Indeed, the largest single contributor to the Clinton Foundation in the 2010s was one Victor Pinchuk, a Ukrainian oligarch whose fortune came from making piping used in the energy industry. In 2008, Mr. Pinchuk made a five-year, $29 million commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative. The pledge was to fund a program to train future Ukrainian leaders and professionals “to modernize Ukraine,” according to the Clinton Foundation.
Ukrainian tycoon Viktor Pinchuk, 2015. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
Schweizer and co-host Eric Eggers explained that “for the Clintons, it’s basically an ‘iron triangle.’ It’s them collecting money through their foundation. . . and the poor people of the affected country, in this case Ukraine. Then, the third component are the major companies that want to get the inside track on sweetheart deals in a country that’s at war. This is the iron triangle.”
The Government Accountability Institute did research on the nexus between Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state under President Barack Obama and various oligarchs in both Russia and Ukraine. A great example of that, all part of Hillary’s infamous “Russia Reset” policy, can be found in GAI’s report on the Skolkovo project in Russia.
“We had a whole chapter devoted to Haiti, and all you have to do is look at where Haiti is now and remember that both Bill and Hillary Clinton were singularly positioned to be in charge of the rebuild of Haiti after the earthquake,” Schweizer said. He noted, for example, that one of those contracts in Haiti went to Tony Rodham, Hillary’s brother.
In short, watch where the money raised and awarded for disaster relief in Ukraine winds up.
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